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Tag valuables with a plastic fingerprint

WHO says only humans should have fingerprints? A technique for generating artificial ones could see banknotes, jewellery and other valuables tagged with a unique pattern to fight counterfeiters.

Wook Park of Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, and his colleagues created fake fingerprints by mixing two kinds of plastic to make discs that were 0.4 millimetres across. They then coated the discs with a thin layer of silica and dried them out, shrinking the plastic core and making the discs wrinkle like fingerprints (Advanced Materials, doi.org/f25p5s).

To test their uniqueness, the team created thousands of patterned discs and analysed them using standard fingerprint recognition algorithms. The minutiae – the ridges used to identify fingerprints – on the fakes were similar to human prints. In fact, the fakes had more variety, because human fingerprints are likely to orient themselves to our fingertips.

The team also experimented with prints shaped like letters, squares and stars to add variety. Theoretically, their method can produce 10135 unique patterns – far more than the number of atoms in the universe.

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Theoretically, they can produce more fingerprints than the number of atoms in the universe

Next they applied fake fingerprints to a passport, a ring and a watch. The prints are just large enough to be visible to the human eye, but small enough to be unobtrusive. Using a portable microscope attached to an iPhone camera, they took a picture of the fingerprints and could see the ridges, although the resolution was too low to uniquely identify them.

Arun Ross of Michigan State University in East Lansing says fake fingerprints might someday replace your own, if they can be securely linked to an individual. Right now, if your fingerprints are stolen there is no way to revoke them, like you would a compromised password. “There could be some value in considering this for creating cancellable biometrics,” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Tag valuables with a plastic fingerprint”